Phinishing the Fotomontage

This project was easy to start and very difficult to finish. As I said in the previous post regarding this project, our assignment is to create a new story by compositing at least five of the images from our "100 photograph" assignment from earlier in the quarter using Adobe Photoshop. At first I was able to do some quick copy+paste and fuzzy select to breeze right through the initial rotoscoping. Once the images were roughly compiled I had to dial in the colors, mask out the fine edges and address the lighting concerns.

It was one of these things where, the more I did, the worse it got. For one thing, in Photoshop the adjustment layers feature creates a lens across all of the layers underneath it. You can mask-out the areas that you want to keep out of the color adjustment, but it's time consuming and difficult to control. One of my favorite pictures was of my daughter. She was at the center of the image, staring at the veterans monument on the left hand side of the image. Unfortunately, I really had to retake the image, since she really is the focus of the image and she was not at the same resolution as the rest of the image.

While I was retaking the image, I was constantly either taking a blurry picture (with a wide F-stop) or a dark picture (with a narrow fstop). I had to choose one of the dark, saturated examples which led to a color clash with the rest of the image. I threw down an adjustment layer, masked out the rest of the image and feebly played with the color. At first I tried Curves, but every little adjustment would only dramatically saturate the image in a new direction. Then I tried a brightness/contrast in the hopes of washing her out a little bit, back into the blue surrounding her. I could not get the masking from the previous adjustment layer to copy+paste into the masking for the brightness/contrast layer, so I was kind of trapped masking it all over again. Anyway, it was a poor choice so I left it out. Then I tried a saturation/ hue layer, again tediously masking the whole thing out by hand. Again, I could not adjust the layer appropriately. I felt like I was typing with swollen digits, like I could so easily fix the problem in Gimp and sneaker-net it back over. But in the end, I also knew that the right attitude was to really push my self to learn the tools of the trade.

Alas, all projects must come to an end. I did the best I could with the time that I had. Could have been better. :(